What Scargill insufficiently comprehended was the extent to which those in Whitehall felt they had now been drubbed once too often and that such humiliation could not be allowed to happen again.
While the miners embraced their dynamic and relatively youthful champion (at forty-four he was young to be leading a union), electing Scargill NUM president with 70 per cent of the vote in November
1981, Thatcher recognized that the next time the miners threatened to switch the country’s lights off, the government needed to have a back-up supply to keep them on. MISC 57, a secret
Cabinet committee, chaired by the civil servant Peter Gregson, was set up with a remit to draw up contingency plans. One answer was to build more nuclear power stations. About 14 per cent of the
United Kingdom’s energy supplies were coming from nuclear energy in the early eighties, but it would take a long time before new plants could be built – far longer than the expected
date of the next miners’ strike – and in the meantime not nearly enough nuclear energy could be supplied to fill the gap left by coal. This left two other options: to convert more of
the existing power stations to burn oil (a much more expensive option than letting them burn coal), or to stockpile coal in order to endure a long strike. When the Heath government had gone for
broke with the three-day week in January 1974, coal stocks had been down to 15 million tonnes. By 1984, stocks had been built up to 48.7 million tonnes, which represented careful husbandry
considering that coal production had been cut by a quarter because of the NUM’s imposition of an overtime ban (by such means the union, rather than the management, exercised the muscle
effectively to decide maximum output).
Two appointments in the aftermath of the 1983 general election victory suggested Thatcher was readying herself for the inevitable showdown. The first was her new energy secretary. Peter Walker
was an adept politician and a personable communicator. Although a leading Tory ‘wet’, he was, as Heath’s former trade and industry secretary, not disposed to be sentimental
towards the miners’ cause. The second was the announcement that the new chairman of the National Coal Board (NCB) – the management body of the nationalized coal mines – was to be
the abrasive, seventy-year-old Scots-American, Ian MacGregor. His record, like his verbal brevity, spoke for itself. In his previous job, running the nationalized steel industry, he had cut British
Steel’s workforce from 166,000 to 71,000 between 1979 and 1983 and its annual losses from £1.8 billion to £256 million.
When it came to coal, subsidy could circumvent market economics but not geological realities. Exhaustion of seams and successive rationalizations, even during periods of greatly increased
investment, had shrunk the coal industry from 700,000 employees in 980 pits at the time the collieries were
nationalized in 1946 to 184,000 employees in 174 pits at the
beginning of 1984. Even the 1974–9 Labour government, which considered it expedient to keep the miners satisfied, found it necessary to close thirty-two pits. Despite this contraction, a 1983
report by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission suggested that three quarters of the country’s pits were loss-making. Thus the mines received an annual subsidy from taxpayers of £1.3
billion and still managed to record an annual loss of £250 million, with production targets (even when hit by overtime bans) greater than the market for coal and surplus quantities remaining
unsold. There was, however, nothing uniquely British about this state of affairs. Indeed, the main foreign coal industries, including those of Britain’s partners in the European Community,
were similarly – and even less productively – bankrolled by their taxpayers. Thus making British coal mining more cost-effective would not necessarily secure it a future when it was
traded against the subsidized extraction of other nations. There were other concerns, such as the security of the energy supply (an argument undercut by the NUM’s record of industrial
action), but the substantive issue was whether prolonging the slow death of a finite industry by out-subsidizing the heavily subsidized competition represented a worthwhile return on
taxpayers’ resources.
The impartial logic of the market offered little comfort to those miners who believed they had a right to work and that without the pithead wheels turning, no prospect existed for them to find
alternative employment. According to this assessment of their future, miners would be dependent on the state whatever happened: Whitehall’s choice was either to subsidize them, at ever
greater cost, to dig out ever thinning seams of coal, or simply to pay them welfare benefits to do nothing. The options were succinctly expressed by the slogan the NUM would soon adopt: ‘Coal
Not Dole’. Mining communities were just that, and to remove the mine would be to kill the community. To those who regarded pit village life as insular and its appeal as unfathomable –
particularly when a pit village, without a pit, had lost its rationale – to up sticks and move to an area where more jobs were available seemed the obvious solution. But mining was not a
skill easily transferred to most new trades, especially not to the developing technological and white-collar job market. That eight hundred pits had closed or merged over the past forty years
without an overall diminution in the living standards of mining areas ought to have assuaged the worst fears of those who saw the next round of colliery closures as a callous assault on a way of
life. Between 1960 and 1968, 346,000 miners had opted for voluntary redundancy, a figure that towered over the numbers who would quit the collieries during the eighties. But these previous
contractions had coincided – at least until the 1970s – with a relative ease of finding other suitable jobs. Those were in short supply in the Britain of 1984. Thus the example of their
forefathers who had severed their bonds to find new work elsewhere held no more traction than the bicycle ridden by Norman Tebbit’s job-seeking father. Culturally,
there remained a chasm between a government on one side talking the language of change, innovation, moving on and social mobility and, on the other side, miners whose sense of identity –
expressed through their banners, social clubs, galas, commemoration of past struggles and loyalty to their union – was built upon venerating themselves as the embodiment of the British
working class. To aspire to becoming something ‘other’ was to betray this heritage and its values. The miners were the real conservatives.
At the beginning of March 1984, Ian MacGregor proposed cutting the mining workforce by 44,000 with the loss of around twenty pits. This was not out of line with the long-term trend. Indeed, it
was less than the number of pit closures presided over by the last Labour government. Nor did the terms and conditions suggest that either the NCB or Peter Walker was looking to provoke a strike
over this issue at this time. Far from presenting the miners with as stark a prospect as possible in the hope of goading them into a strike, the terms were intended to minimize that risk. No
previous generation of miners had been offered anything comparable. All mine workers between the ages of twenty-one and fifty who took up the offer would be given a voluntary redundancy payment as
a lump sum, at a rate of £1,000 for every year of employment. For those who had worked twenty or thirty years, this represented a pay-off equivalent to the price of a house, given that
property prices in mining villages were considerably lower than the country’s average of £34,000 in 1985. But staying in an area deprived of the primary employer, upon which other local
businesses were dependent, was hardly a prospect to be grasped with unbridled joy. What was more, there could be no guarantee that – as in the past, so in the future – more closures
would not be announced in subsequent years. MacGregor may not, as Scargill claimed, have already drawn up a secret hit list of other pits to close, but the logic of his ambition ultimately to make
the coal industry profitable implied that those scheduled for closure by 1985 would not be the last. If a stand were not made now, then might it not be too late to maintain coal mining as a major
industry? When, on 5 March 1984, miners at the first pit named for imminent closure, Cortonwood in South Yorkshire, walked out and called on other Yorkshire collieries to join them, they discovered
a groundswell of support from other NUM branches. In fact, Cortonwood exemplified the problems afflicting the industry: its coal was sold for £47 per tonne, despite costing £64 per
tonne to excavate. News of its closure was nonetheless greeted with alarm and anger. Declarations of solidarity from the NUM leadership in Yorkshire and Scotland were followed by Durham and Kent,
turning Cortonwood’s struggle into a nationwide showdown for the
future of the industry. By 12 March, about half of Britain’s 184,000 miners were on strike.
The NUM’s national executive was faced with a dilemma. To be constitutional, an official nationwide strike necessitated holding a ballot of all the union’s members. An alternative
strategy was to let the strike develop where support for it was greatest and then use flying pickets (strikers from one area bussed into another) to persuade, or intimidate, non-striking areas into
joining the action. In this way, a countrywide strike could be instigated without having to hold a vote to ensure it enjoyed majority support. There were obvious objections to such a strategy.
Calling a nationwide strike without seeking a nationwide mandate patently lacked democratic legitimacy, and allowed the NCB and the government to claim that the strike was being spread through
coercion, rather than with the genuine support of most miners. Subsequent opinion polls suggested that 88 per cent of the public thought a ballot should have been held,
9
and the issue caused a rift with Neil Kinnock, who had succeeded Michael Foot as leader of the Labour Party in October 1983, who forlornly pleaded with Scargill to seek a
proper mandate. Had a ballot confirmed the support of most miners for the strike, the likelihood is that far fewer miners would have persisted in turning up for work. Furthermore, the use of flying
pickets to shut down pits where men were still working would almost inevitably ensure confrontation and violence if those labelled ‘scabs’ were physically prevented from exercising
their right to work. It was also liable to be classified as ‘secondary action’ (picketing by those not directly employed at the plant in question), which the Conservatives had made
illegal in the Employment Act 1980. While it would prove impractical for the police to arrest thousands of pickets at any one time, legislation in 1982 had made unions liable for damages if the
courts found that their officials had promoted unlawful action. By not calling a national ballot, Scargill adopted a risky strategy. By relying on flying pickets to persuade or intimidate those
intent on continuing to work, he was embarking upon a collision course with the police and the courts.
At a tactical level, the NUM leadership’s reasoning was understandable. Three times between 1982 and 1983 Scargill had called for a strike and three times his members, when balloted, had
rebuffed that call. Now that a major strike was under way, it was risky to hold a vote the result of which might go against the action. On 19 March, eight NUM areas in the Midlands, the North-East
and the North-West took matters into their own hands and balloted their members on whether to join the strike. These ballots involved 70,000 miners, 50,000 of whom voted against joining the strike.
In Nottinghamshire, the scale of the rejection (73 per cent to 27 per cent) was overwhelming. The problem was that it was the least militant areas that had held the ballots, and so the result could
not be extrapolated to South
Yorkshire, Scotland, South Wales or Kent. An opinion poll of miners on 31 March suggested that if Scargill had held a national ballot he would
probably have won it – respondents favouring striking by 51 per cent to 34 per cent.
10
But he could not have been totally confident of the
result and chose not to risk it. As the NUM’s vice president, the Scottish communist Mick McGahey, put it: ‘We shall not be constitutionalized out of a strike.’
11
The battleground was the Midlands coalfields. Nottinghamshire, with 31,000 non-striking miners and forty-two pits still operating, quickly felt the full force of flying pickets from South
Yorkshire and beyond, as the NUM endeavoured to coordinate its invasion of the dissident county. To ensure they kept their troops in the field, the NUM only distributed strike pay to those who
actively joined the picket lines. The Social Security Act 1980 had prevented strikers from claiming welfare benefits while a dispute lasted (although their families could still claim benefits),
consequently, signing up for picket duty became a vital source of income for tens of thousands of strikers. The opposing forces, meanwhile, were also coordinating their response. MISC 57 had
anticipated the NUM’s strategy and concluded that leaving the country’s fifty-two police forces to deal individually with a nationally coordinated picketing offensive would put
intolerable strain upon constabularies in the key areas. To meet the challenge, the police established a National Reporting Centre to organize the call-up of reserves from around the country to
police the picketing. As well as meeting the manpower needs, bringing in police officers from outside the community they served also made sense given rising tensions in the insurgent pit villages.
However, there was a clear risk that by deploying the police in this manner they would be seen to have become a centralized and politicized tool of the Tory government. The establishment of
roadblocks to turn back busloads of flying pickets intent on besieging working collieries was particularly contentious. The alternative, though, was to accept that the law prohibiting secondary
picketing was inoperable and that individuals and companies were to be left to the mercy of organized gangs from outside the area who were intent on preventing them lawfully going about their
business. The balance between being seen to uphold the liberty of workers without becoming state-run strike-breakers was a difficult one to achieve, and as the dispute intensified the number of
complaints about police partisanship multiplied. Scargill’s wife, Anne, was one of many non-violent protesters whose experience of being arrested and treated disrespectfully by police
officers, only to have the courts subsequently dismiss the charges, diminished what respect they had previously had for the British bobby.
12
Twelve months in which thousands of people from one community traded insults, blows and court appearances with the forces of law and order could only have a corrosive effect on relations between
the two entities.